The sky was white-knuckling it. We had just come off the road, and our unconscious, though once weeded, plowed, and planted, had long since gone to seed. Behind the guest house, pumpkins dangled from the root clump of an uprooted oak, the hillside greened with rye grass. "I bet rabbits come here," a woman said, tipping her hat to another woman going to fetch the paper from the box. Penned dogs spun in circles, an expression of canine disbelief. We offered our upturned fingers through the wire. "I’m glad it stopped raining," several people said. "The road is slickest in the first few minutes of rain," we were reminded, our palms still bearing the steering wheel’s lines and warmth. "Is there a judge here?" asked a man in love with verdicts. "Should we settle?"

Duplexes jutted against ranch-style homes and farm houses behind prickly shrubbery pocked with berries and slowly sunk into the overgrown fields of volunteering rhizomes and the trees that fenced them. Sometimes babysitters thought they saw the children of whom they were in charge slipping down the throats of persimmons. A record harvest followed, and a large cash reward was offered to anyone who found children shriveled inside or snuggling happily next to the damp pits. Grown folks got slurped into navel oranges. During planting season, grieving parents and lovers joined forces and choked the neighborhood with orchards in hopes of stepping outside one morning to find the faces they used to kiss ripening, reddish in luminous foliage. The sky loosened, and color seeped back into our dirty hands.

Red neckties silk the mountain. You and I sulk at the table. The Vaseline won’t release our anchors. Cormorants feed from the fishbowl of the navel.

You read the salt on my table. It must have been left from too much handling of anchors. I sleep on the banks of the navel. When you put on your hiking shoes, your spine rises like my favorite mountain.

We’ll have to take feathers for anchors. Clip the wings of the navel. Else we’ll have to follow it up the mountain. Coax it down to the head of the table.

How long must we knock at the shuttered navel? We live in the gray of a lead mountain. Leave its shades at the table. Cut the anchors.

The mountain and table drift from the port of the navel, and the anchor hatches in the cormorant’s mouth.